


The Dream Forest

by GretchenSinister



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: A story about you, Experimental Style, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-10
Updated: 2020-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:54:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23088904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: I think this is Blacksand. But it’s also a story about you.It was inspired by this post. [link to image of a deer skull colored black with gold-filled cracks in it]As well as these awesome Sandy and Pitch designs by whentheoceanmetsky. (When you read it, I’m sure you’ll be like “huh?” but these were the inspirations, okay?)
Relationships: Pitch Black/Sanderson Mansnoozie
Kudos: 1
Collections: Blacksand Short Fics





	The Dream Forest

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 9/29/2013.

They say if you go into the forest, you will dream.

Which forest? you ask.

The forest, I answer. When you see it, you will know it. It is the forest you lost yourself in as a child. The forest you know even if you were a child of the city.

* * *

In this forest it is never Spring, and rarely Summer. Occasionally, it will be Winter, and the silent snow will fall softly in the clearings and weigh heavy on the bare branches like secrets in your heart. (Yes, your heart.)

Most often, it is Fall. If you try to call it Autumn, the word will die on your tongue. Fall is the word for the season in this forest, for it means many things. Like the forest.

Mornings in the forest are full of chill mists that muffle the unmelody of birdsong (sweet and harsh and, so far, to you, meaningless) and hush the incessant rush of the forest’s brooks and waterfalls (at dawn they sound more like voices than at any other time).

Noon, if you notice it, will pass in an instant as you stand at the edge of a still pool in the center of the forest (though every point in the forest is the center—but I tell you nothing new). The mirrorlike water will eagerly reflect the high sun with dazzling brilliance. If you look, you will be blinded for a time. You know this, and you will look anyway. When your sight returns the sun will have moved on, and you will realize how deep, how dark, the water is when the sun is no longer giving it a gilded façade. (Perhaps it has no bottom.) If you drink the water, it will be cold and sweet. If you drink from this pool the first time you find it, you are braver or more thirsty than most.

You will try to determine if the tumbled stones around the edge of the pool show evidence that they were once touched by human hands. You will try, and you will fail.

But usually you will not notice noon.

Afternoon will come upon you like a well-fed tiger or the ghost of a dead and blasphemed god of love. The sunlight will turn warm and ever more golden; warm as the tongue of the beast you did not want to become a prince, golden as his eyes or the silky fur of his underbelly (oh how your fingertips lingered on the monster! But this did not really happen, you protest). The light will shine through the trees of the forest; half still clothed in leaves a fine and glossy green, of a shade that slides to black in even the faintest shadow; half teasingly, easily tossing aside leaves almost as richly golden as the light. They flutter through the air and fall in heaps on the rich dark soil, looking more like heaps of pirate or djinni treasure than any pile of metal could.

Above the trees the sky will be a blue smooth and rich as cream, a blue so bright you may feel tears in your eyes at your ability to see such a vivid color. The blue of the sky will flash into your mind with every glance with the feeling that comes after hearing the far-off cry of a hawk, after the last chord of a beautiful wordless song you want to remember but know you will forget fades into the air. The blue of the sky will tell you, and tell you true, that your soul is in you. It will also tell you that soul can ache.

In the forest, as you walk through the black-trunked trees and the drifts of gold leaves under the blue sky, you will see no animals. In this forest, you are the only animal—and even then, in this particular forest, you are not quite an animal.

As the shadows grow, the sun sinking lower and the warm golden light silently, sweetly, luxuriously yielding to the cool lengthening shadows, you may begin to see movement in the forest. Neither of the beings responsible for the movement you may see (that is, if they let you) can properly be referred to as “first”, but the first you are likely to be allowed to see, with your human eyes, appears most often in the form of a golden owl.

Imagine now, if you will, before you see it, the broad, heart-shaped disk of its face, the long, shining pinions of its wings, the startling cast-iron black of its talons (with claw-tips of fallow gold), and, finally, imagine its eyes like living topaz, devoid of pupil, yet able to see both wider and deeper than any owl you have seen or imagined before. You will be startled by it, at first, for its flight is utterly silent, silent as the slow turning of the unknown stars overhead, silent as the space between synchronous heartbeats in a lover’s bed just before the dawn. You may be troubled by the impression that the owl is smiling. After all, you know quite well that such an expression is impossible for a beaked creature.

The second being you may see is not quite so silent. It breathes, and you may hear its footfalls rustling in the fallen golden leaves. At first glance, you will find it difficult to say what, exactly, this creature is. In part, this is because this creature does not show itself before the sun has set, before the sky is, at least, the rich blue-purple like the taste of sun-warmed mulberries, before the first star appears like one loose jewel balanced on a lover’s skin, blood-heated and glinting in the light of amber-scented candles. In part, it is not. When the creature relinquishes its protean potentiality, you will see it as a stag, black as the space between the stars in the farthest hour from dawn. Its fur will not shine in the bright moonlight once that lambent orb rises; instead, all that light will be swallowed down into the satiny, matte darkness of its dense hair.

The light will catch in its eyes, though, pools of ink that may never be used to write a comprehensible story. The light too will catch and linger in the hot fog of its breath that roils into the chill of the newly-fallen always-falling night in this forest. And yet, beyond these, the light will cling to and caress the stag’s golden hooves, glinting upon them as it lifts them from the crisp, whispery leaves. The light will cling to and caress, too, the delicate hairline cracks that craze the stag’s antlers, the pattern complex as fine lace, each thin crevasse filled with gold. Your eye will touch these antlers only with trepidation as they branch wide and fragile-seeming, intricate as the spread of neurons in the human brain or the distribution of galaxies throughout the universe.

If you are afraid of this stag, it will not be surprised.

But I will tell you now (and maybe you already know) that as you stand waking before this creature, you are in no danger. Do not fear for your body, despite the myriad points of its antlers, despite the dense muscles you can almost see tensing and relaxing fiber by fiber underneath its midnight hide.

No, the danger is not in the stag alone, nor is it in the solitary silence of the golden owl. The uneasy wonder that creeps through your veins and nerves upon seeing either has its wellspring in your mind alone.

Yet if you wander often in the forest, the possibility approaches certainty that you will see both creatures at once. And the danger is here (if it is truly danger) for when the two are together, the forest and everything in the forest may change. And you, seeing them, are certainly in the forest.

Grip your arms and grind your teeth, then, when you see the stag weaving through the trees in a pattern reflective of harmonic intervals (especially beware crossing the paths that mark the tritone), the golden owl perched on its back, an expression that seems to be of pleasure in its fathomless eyes and the shallow scrying-bowl of its face. Back away, avoiding the crunching leaves, holding your breath, when you see the owl flying before the stag, black bars now stretching across its feathers, elegant accents; the golden crazing on the stag’s antlers shining like the harvest moon. You should run, but you will not be able to run, when you see two stags passing through the forest like ghosts, black fur shimmering gold in the moonlight, obsidian antlers dripping with ragged, unseasonable golden velvet, huge golden wings, barred with black, folded neatly against their powerful flanks. You will not be able to run, because your desire to see those wings spread will be too strong. You would not have been able to enter the forest if it was not.

When you see their wings spread, you may weep, and you may not know why. If you are one who will see them fly (for they do fly, shining and dark across the moon, reflected shining and dark in the cool, central pool, shining and dark above the treetops) you will weep, and you will know why.

By the time you see them like this, it will be very late in the long, long night. You will feel a heaviness flowing through your limbs like spicy-sweet and oh-so-dark molasses. Your eyelids will begin to droop over your reddened eyes, your blinks will grow slower and slower, intervals of darkness increasing like the curve of the moon, like the Fall nights themselves. Your wariness of the forest will begin to be subsumed in your longing for sleep, and you will start to think of how dry and soft the fallen golden leaves will be. They may yet retain the heat of the sun, even so late at night. You will look around, and see that the stag and the owl, or the winged stags, are gone. In the palest gold of the light of the huge full moon, you will stretch your limbs and dare to gild them.

You have already begun to deserve such ornamentation, such cleansing, in this forest you have always known.

Then, your body languid yet something in your heart twanging like some tightly-wound brass wire, you will settle into one of the drifts of leaves, piled so invitingly at the foot of one of the wide, black tree trunks. (Perhaps the wind has blown them there especially for you.) The leaves will feel almost like silk, almost like feathers, almost like the pages of that book you loved as a child, oh what was it? You remember neither plot, nor characters, nor title, nor author. You only remember how the cheap paper felt under your little fingers, and a sense, like the memory of a sound that calls to mind a memory of a scent, that the cover was red. Yet for all this the leaves are still leaves, and as you pull them over you and shift on top of them, many crumble, covering your hair with gold dust.

You may even breathe these atomies of the forest, and then, then you will be lost. Or found. Or where you always were, in the center of the forest. Whichever way, whichever word, you will close your eyes then, slip into your individual darkness, into the shadows that only you, of all humans, may enter (though, like all darknesses, it is also part of the forest at night).

And you will dream, as they say, as I say. You will dream of the forest, though you may not see the trees, the pool, or the sky. Of course, all dreams, at their pulsing not-hearts, are of the forest.

Now that I have told you this, perhaps you will recognize the branches growing from the walls of the house in which you grew up, the pool drowning the halls of your school, grown strangely labyrinthine, or the sky in your open mouth full of loosening teeth.

You will waken, of course, after a time, in a place that does not appear to be the forest.

But now that you know about the forest, you will return. And you will dream again. After a time, or something like time, you will begin to dream the golden owl. The black stag. The black stags with golden owl’s wings. You will see them fly, and now you will not weep.

You will not weep, but neither will you wake. You may think you wake. You may feel an ache you cannot define, thinking you wake. You may try to balm this ache with ink, paint, clay, stone, glass, paper, chalk, wood, metal, fabric, sound, movement, flavor, juxtaposition, or all of these.

And then, one afternoon, heavy and golden; one morning, cold and bright; one evening, violet and fragrant; one night, black and secret, you will look into a mirror, a glass shop window, the side of a pint glass, the gloss of another’s eye, and you will see yourself speak, gold leaves falling from your lips. You will see ebony antlers laced with gold growing from your hidden skull. You will bow your head with the weight and, looking down, you will find a long, golden feather at your feet.

And now the ache will make you laugh, for you have seen that you are claimed, you have not woken, you have not left the forest. You will never have left the forest.

What a relief it will be for you to realize the gum-spotted sidewalks and the square gray buildings and the tubes of fluorescent lights and the coffee with grounds in it and the heavy humid days neither hot nor cold and vague driving directions and the cable bill and informational emails from your employer are in fact, in fiction, only illusory. How glorious it will be to see the walls roll into trunks, to see chilly lightbulbs ripen into branches, to see all the paper trivialities flutter away as brilliant leaves, to hear mechanical cacophony fade into wind, to spit out the coffee, knowing now where clear water is. Knowing that you are now free to sleep. Now free to dream.

And now you will find yourself spreading your wings under the sun of the forest, tossing your antlers under the starlight of the forest, gazing with gold-black eyes under the moon of the forest.

You will see the owl and the stag in forms like you once had, you will see then that their games and terrors eternally orbit but one idea, an idea too large for words but if it had to be named in one word that word would be love. And you will not be surprised, though before you would have been. They will not mind that you watch. For every dream is watching, every step through the forest is watching, and as the way they are can barely be encompassed by the word love, it is entirely out of reach of shame. And, after all, they have invited you.

After a time—though what does this mean, in a forest where it is always Fall—you will see that you have done more than borrowed wings or antlers or gold-black eyes, that you have become an owl or a stag yourself. You will soar beneath the branches, you will bound between the tree trunks; you will learn to read the forest, you will learn to read the story behind all stories with your gold eyes and your black eyes. And it will be different each time.

And when you are a stag you will learn all the secrets of the owl’s wings, and when you are an owl you will learn all the secrets of the coiled muscles of the stag. When you are a winged stag and the other flies beside you, you will learn of such joys as you imagined at fourteen, such joys as you told yourself must be only fantasy at twenty-eight.

And sometimes you will not fly, you will not run. You will walk in a shape much like the one in which you began, and you will not walk alone.

And though you do not leave the forest you will walk among those who are not in the forest. You will find a few you wish to speak to. You will tell them, “They say if you go into the forest, you will dream.”

They will be very beautiful when you look at them through your owl’s eyes, your stag’s eyes, and more beautiful still when they look at you through their stag’s eyes, their owl’s eyes, and most beautiful yet when they look out of your owl’s eyes, your stag’s eyes, beside you, mind in mind, as you (and you and you and you) watch the next beautiful, drowsy, invited interloper sink into the leaves.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments from Tumblr:
> 
> gretchensinister reblogged this from gretchensinister and added:  
> I’m reblogging this one because I really like it and I’ve gained many more followers since I first posted it. (Whether it is to these new followers’ interests, of course, remains to be seen.)#mostly just a dreamlike short story
> 
> whentheoceanmetsky reblogged this from gretchensinister and added:  
> oh my god im gonna cry gretchen how did you know about their magic forest that is a thing i legit thought about get out of my head (no stay, stay forever)
> 
> also if you were going for simultaneous feelings of trepidation and wonder while reading this
> 
> you nailed it #THE FOREST ALWAYS BEING HALF ALIVE AND HALF BARE #ALWAYS GOLD AND PALE AND JUST A LITTLE WASHED OUT #JUST ENOUGH THAT WHEN YOU SEE COLOR IT POPS #IM SUPER EMOTIONAL RN #GONNA GO FINISH THAT PICTURE


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